'Invisible' transgender vets emerge from shadows

In a city that prides itself on respect for military veterans, scorn is a fact of life for former Army Capt. Erin Russ.
Neighbors gawk when she takes out the trash. At Tucson malls, teen-agers titter and hiss as the strapping ex-infantry officer shops for cashmere and heels.
Even simple errands can be a source of angst for Russ, who was born a man but now lives as a woman.
Decades after former soldier Christine Jorgensen stunned 1950s America by undergoing a sex change, a small army of veterans in similar straits has quietly sprung up around the country.
A national group, the Transgender American Veterans Association, estimates that somewhere around 300,000 transgender people have served, or now serve, in the U.S. military. That's roughly 1 percent of the country's nearly 27 million veterans and 2.2 million active-duty and reserve troops.
Officially, the Pentagon bans transsexuals -- those who believe they were born with the wrong male or female parts -- from serving.
Yet some research suggests there may be a higher prevalence in the military than in society at large. That's because some young men, conflicted over their feminine feelings, enlist to try to escape them, the research found.
Advocates refer to these former troops as "invisible" veterans.
"This is something I think nobody wants to talk about," said Russ, 52. "Transgender veterans basically make other people rethink their preconceived ideas of what a veteran is. We don't just push the envelope -- we crumple it up and throw it away."
Mocked by strangers and often shortchanged by the veterans health-care system, these ex-troops say they get little of the respect accorded those they served alongside.
No one knows for sure how many veterans are affected by "gender identity disorder," which the American Medical Association calls "a serious medical condition ... which causes intense emotional pain and suffering."
Transgender people aren't eligible to serve because they fall under a policy that excludes those with "learning, psychiatric and behavioral disorders," said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. Army recruiting command.
Yet one of the few studies ever published on the topic said the U.S. military probably has more of them in its ranks than the percentage in the general population.
A study titled "Transsexuals in the Military: Flight Into Hypermasculinity" -- a classic still cited in college texts on gender issues -- was written in 1988 by Dr. George R. Brown, then an Air Force captain and psychiatrist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Brown found it curious that in a three-year period at the Midwestern base, he came across 11 men -- eight current and former military, the rest civilians such as Defense Department staffers -- all seeking treatment to become women.
Transsexuality is an issue "believed by many not to exist" in the armed forces, he noted. Yet each veteran told him nearly the same thing: He had enlisted hoping to "become a real man."
Brown also noted that late adolescence -- the stage when cross-gender feelings can become so confusing that some feel an urgent need to escape them -- coincides with the prime recruiting age for the predominantly male U.S. military.
"Don't ask, don't tell" -- the U.S. policy on gay and lesbian personnel -- doesn't cover transgender troops, who typically are forced out if discovered. A few Western militaries, though -- including Canada and the United Kingdom -- welcome their service and even pay for their sex-change surgeries.
That's how it was for Russ, the former Army captain who has been living full time as a female since 2001. Even as a preschooler, she said, "I knew something was different about me."
Joining the military was one action in a long list of things -- playing football, becoming an Eagle Scout, getting married and becoming a father -- that Russ hoped would still the inner sense of being born with the wrong anatomy.
Growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., in a 1950s neighborhood full of boys, Russ chose to play with girls and was deemed "a sissy."
In junior high, Russ started cross-dressing in secret, a practice that would continue for years as the young man wrestled with the turmoil between who he believed he was and who he pretended to be.
Commissioned as an Army officer in 1979, Russ served a total of 11 years in the reserves and on active duty, and planned to stay on until retirement. But in 1990, Russ said, "My career came to a screeching halt."
While stationed at Fort Wainwright in Alaska, the captain, off-duty and dressed as a woman, was stopped by civilian police for a driving violation. The traffic cop "wrote a page-long report on how I was dressed and gave a copy to the military," Russ said.
"On Monday morning, I was called into the commander's office and told I was going to be court-martialed for conduct unbecoming an officer."
Russ was allowed to resign honorably and, after a painful divorce, came to Tucson a few years later. "At that point, I was thinking, 'I can't go on like this.' "
So she grew her hair long and started going to the veterans hospital for hormone treatments, which softened her skin and swelled her breasts.
Then, ignoring the neighbors' stares, the 6-foot-2 former soldier walked out her front door and started living a new life.

(E-mail Carol Ann Alaimo at calaimo(at)azstarnet.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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